Biracial, and also black

By Martha S. Jones, Special to CNN

Updated 9:55 AM ET, Wed February 12, 2014

Famous biracial people26 photos

Famous, biracial and black – "My mother was of a darker complexion. ...My father was a white man," abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote in the autobiography, "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave."

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Famous, biracial and black – Booker T. Washington, educator and champion of rights for blacks, was born to a black woman, Jane. She never named his white father, who was said to be a nearby planter.

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Famous, biracial and black – California Attorney General Kamala Harris is the first female, African-American and Asian-American lawyer for the state. Her mother is Indian, and her father is Jamaican-American.

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Famous, biracial and black – "My father's white and my mother's black," former NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Jealous told the Los Angeles Times in 2009."There was always a conversation on race and racial exclusion in our household."

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Famous, biracial and black – Actress Maya Rudolph is the daughter of soul singer Minnie Riperton and songwriter Richard Rudolph. "I don't care for labels," she said in the HBO documentary "The Black List." "They're just kind of, forced."

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Famous, biracial and black – Lenny Kravitz is the son of Roxie Roker, who played Helen Willis on the TV sitcom "The Jeffersons," and NBC news producer Sy Kravitz. "I knew that my father physically looked different from my mother, but that wasn't an issue to me," Lenny Kravitz said on Oprah's "Master Class." "People look different."

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Famous, biracial and black – Actress Lisa Bonet, best known for her role as Denise Huxtable on "The Cosby Show" and "A Different World," is the daughter of a Jewish mother and African-American father.

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Famous, biracial and black – Actor Wentworth Miller is the son of a black father and white mother. "It's very easy to be the young Tom Cruise, because Hollywood knows what to do with you," he told People magazine in 2006. "But if you're someone who's bringing someone slightly left of center to the table, you're not a sure thing."

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Famous, biracial and black – Actress Rashida Jones is the daughter of actress Peggy Lipton and record producer Quincy Jones, pictured here. On her identity, she remarked: "It's more of a challenge for other people than it is for me. I have no issues with my identity."

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Famous, biracial and black – Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson described himself as "half-black and half-Samoan," to Vibe magazine in 1999. He is the son of wrestler Rocky Johnson and grandson to wrestler Peter Maivia, who was Samoan.

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Famous, biracial and black – Actress Jennifer Beals, best known for her role in "Flashdance," is the daughter of an African-American businessman and an Irish Catholic educator.

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Famous biracial people26 photos

Famous, biracial and black – Rapper Drake is the son of a black father and white Jewish mother. "I'm all mixed up and people embrace that," he told the Village Voice.

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Famous biracial people26 photos

Famous, biracial and black – James McBride, a journalist, jazz artist and National Book award winner, wrote about his mother in the memoir, "The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother." When he asked his mother, who was an Orthodox Jew raised in Poland, if he was white or black, she replied: "You're a human being. Educate yourself or you'll be a nobody."

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Famous, biracial and black – Jasmine Guy, known for her role as Whitley Gilbert in "A Different World," was born to a mother of Portuguese descent and an African-American minister and Morehouse College instructor.

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Famous, biracial and black – Directors Albert and Allen Hughes are twin brothers who made "Menace II Society," "Dead Presidents" and "The Book of Eli." Their mother is of Armenian descent and their father is African-American.

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Famous, biracial and black – Singer Faith Evans was born into music: She was raised by her grandmother and mother, a black blues singer. Her father was an Italian musician.

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Famous biracial people26 photos

Famous, biracial and black – Saul Hudson, more popularly known as the musician Slash, is the former lead guitarist for Guns N' Roses. His mother was a black American and his father a white Brit.

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Famous, biracial and black – Jamaican singer Bob Marley was born to a black Jamaican store owner and cook and a white British army captain.

Famous, biracial and black – British author Zadie Smith is the child of a Jamaican mother and British father.

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Famous biracial people26 photos

Famous, biracial and black – Journalist Malcolm Gladwell is of Jamaican and Irish heritage. "I'm of mixed race," he told CNN in 2011, speaking of what happened when he let his hair grow. "The minute I began to look more like people's stereotype of a black male, (and) have a big Afro, I got stopped by police, and when I went through Customs at the airport, I would always get pulled out. I was getting speeding tickets left and right; it was really kind of a striking transformation in the way the world viewed me."

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Famous, biracial and black – Actress and recording artist Jordin Sparks receives a kiss from her dad, former football player Phillippi Sparks, and mom, Jodi Sparks, at the premiere of "Sparkle."

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Famous, biracial and black – New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter is the son of a white mother and black father. "You'd go places and get stares," he told Barbara Walters about growing up biracial. "If you were just with one of your parents, people would give you a double-take because something just didn't seem right."

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Famous, biracial and black – Television personality Kimora Lee Simmons is the daughter of a Japanese mother and a black American father. "I consider myself to be one of the black women in fashion who made it," she told New York magazine. "But black women don't look at me like that."

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Famous, biracial and black – U.S. President Barack Obama is the son of a white American mother and a black Kenyan father.

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Story highlights

Professor Martha Jones was struck when multiple students noted their mixed race identities

Their stories prompted her to share that she, too, is biracial

You can be biracial and black, Jones writes

My winter 2010 seminar began the way I start every class. I made introductory remarks about themes and requirements for my course on the history of race, law and marriage in the United States.

"Now," I prompted, "let's go around. Tell us about yourself and why you chose this course."

This introduction was routine. But what I heard was anything but the norm: "My mother is black and my father is white." "I'm in an interracial relationship."

Professor Martha Jones

Ordinarily, I am silent, listening and taking notes. But by the time I heard a third student say "I am mixed-race, from a mixed race family," I had set down my notebook and was perched at the edge of my seat.

"Me, too," I heard myself say. And with that, I knew that the class would be anything but routine. Until that moment, I had always told a neater story about my identity. I was, simply put, black. And about my mother being white? That had been irrelevant for me and my "one drop rule" generation.

My students had another perspective.

Everything about my family was mixed up. My mother was from the North, of the working class, and a German Catholic who only glimpsed Protestant kids across the lines of East Buffalo's fractured terrain. My father was from North Carolina, a child of the black middle class and a Methodist with a bishop for an uncle who refused to preside over their interfaith nuptials.

They later joked that this difference -- Protestant versus Catholic -- was the ruin of their marriage. But it wasn't. He was black and she was white, and their 1957 union was prohibited by law in North Carolina, where my father was raised.

When they moved our small family from Harlem to a predominantly white suburb, there they met Jim Crow: red-lining, restrictive covenants and recalcitrant neighbors. Once the bomb threats passed, we spent years in awkward isolation.

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Growing up black and middle-class

My parents were social pariahs while we, their three children, were regrettable unfortunates. I don't recall the moment in 1967 when the United States Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws in Loving v. Virginia. My parents were in the midst of a trial separation, making celebrating our family difficult to do.

But even in sunnier moments, my family rarely acknowledged the social fact of our biracial identity. It was the era of the one drop rule, a view of race that deemed a person with any African ancestry, however remote, to be black.

We were Negroes -- later black, then African-American -- and nothing about our mother's whiteness or our own ambiguous bodies altered that.

"What are you?" schoolmates queried. I can't say that we were asked this more often than other children, but I know that no response elicited more vitriol than the clarification that we were black. The moniker "Casper" (as in ghost or spook) stuck, some backyards were off limits and occasionally fists flew.

Still, we held fast to our one-drop identities.

America largely believed itself organized around a racial binary. It was good to know where you stood, even if it was an awkward fit.

Much of my adult life was guided by the view that, however others might misapprehend me, I was black. And in my circles were friends and colleagues with whom I shared the one-drop identity.

Yes, we had a parent who was not African-American. But that was a quiet fact, one that our bodies might admit but our voices rarely uttered.

Why was that? Perhaps foregrounding a nonblack parent might lead to the charge that we were distancing ourselves from the stigma of blackness. Perhaps we'd be perceived as trying to pass for something that we were not. Perhaps we'd be viewed with suspicion, our loyalties questioned in a world that so often pitted black against white.

Mostly I think we were black because it fit, because it felt right, and because racial identity as a social construction is rooted in more than the fact of one's paternity.

And under the regime of the one-drop rule, I never knew there was an alternative.

Until I had that "me, too" moment in the classroom.

There, I was confronted with student stories that sounded not very different from my own. The mixed race origins of their families had also required a sorting out of identity. They talked about the dynamics of family estrangement but also of love that defied ideas about a color line. They wrestled with social scenes: friendship, dating, and dormitory life where race still seemed to matter. They fretted about checking boxes for college admissions.

But something was different.

As I listened to their stories, it became clear that my students were not adherents to the one-drop rule that had given my generation its place in the national matrix of race.

Yes, they were African-American. This was reflected in their choices of sororities, churches and political organizations. At the same time, they were mixed-race people. Their personal narratives were about lives spent moving back and forth and in between.